Just a reminder to all Missouri Ozarks Rural School Parternship teachers that one of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks' biggest grant rounds of 2011 has its deadline this Friday, March 2, at 5 p.m.

The Coover grantmaking program will provide $102,500 this year in grantmaking support for cooperative ventures that enhance teaching and learning through innovative place-based education programs.

The eight to 15 projects funded annually range from $10,000 to $20,000 per project.

The 2012-13 Coover Place-Based Education Grants will be announced on Thursday, April 26 at the Rural Schools Partnership’s Thomasville Rendezvous. For more information contact
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, Julie Leeth, RSP Coordinator, at (417) 864-6199.

Place-Based Forum

Place-based education breathes life into a community’s past and engages students in discovering the very fabric of their town or region. Dora High School, with support from the Community Foundation of the Ozarks’ Rural School Partnership, has fully embraced place-based learning with stunning results. Their Dora Digital Stories project is an effort worthy of emulation, and it hearkens back to earlier and well-known student-centered archival efforts like Foxfire in Georgia and Bittersweet in Missouri.

Going to school in a beautiful but isolated region of the Missouri Ozarks, Dora students are revisiting their community’s history through video and verse. Excellent examples are Tyler Long’s exploration of a forgotten sinkhole near the hamlet of Pottersville, once a site of play for children who are now grandparents in the area, and Brittany Strong’s look at the history and present use of water witching, also known as dousing, a technique for locating underground water sources.